If you can benefit from wireless technology but have an environment that defeats ordinary wireless systems, this webinar is for you.

Join us at 2:00 P.M. E.T. on Wednesday, September 12 for our Wireless in Manufacturing webinar, which looks at the special challenges of bringing wireless connectivity to difficult industrial environments.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

How industrial and manufacturing environments can benefit from implementing wireless technology.

How to provide coverage in large, difficult areas such as distribution centers with fewer access points.

How to build a highly resilient wireless network with no single point of failure.

How to deploy wireless access points in tough environments such as outdoors or on factory floors.

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Join us at 2:00 P.M. E.T. on Tuesday, August 14 for our Wireless in Hospitality and Retail Webinar. This webinar looks at how state-of-the-art wireless can improve both guest experience and your overall efficiency.

Support for mobile devices is no longer an option but rather a necessity to survive in an increasingly competitive market. If you worry about the quality of your wireless service and network security, then you’ll find important information about new wireless technology in this webinar.

1. Planning for coverage rather than capacity.
A wireless network may have sufficient coverage in the sense that the signal reaches the intended area. However, if there are too many users, the network will become overwhelmed and slow.

LESSON: Count square footage and users.

2. Ignoring differences in power requirements.
Some wireless devices, particularly smartphones and tablet computers, require a higher signal strength to connect. Planning a wireless network with only laptop computers in mind may leave some users hanging.

LESSON: Not all wireless devices are equal.

3. Not distinguishing between user and device
Because mobile devices are subject to malware, good security policy is to grant separate levels of authorization based on both user and device. For instance, a person on a company-owned laptop may be granted a higher level of access than the same person on a personal smartphone.

The PPP, EAP, and 802.1x protocols are often confused with each other, which is no wonder because they’re all interrelated and involve authentication.

Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) was originally a protocol for connecting and authenticating dialup modems. Today’s PPP is usually encapsulated in Ethernet frames and operates over Ethernet as PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE). PPPoE is commonly used for cable modem or DSL connections to an ISP for Internet access. PPP includes two authentication mechanisms: Password Authentication Protocol (PAP) and Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP).

Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is an authentication protocol framework that works inside PPP to provide support for authentication protocols beyond the original PAP and CHAP protocols. EAP supports a wide range of authentication mechanisms including Kerberos, passwords, certificates, and public key authentication, as well as hardware schemes such as authentication dongles, smart cards, and USB tokens.

802.11x simply takes the EAP framework out of PPP and puts it into Ethernet, packetizing it for transmission over a wired or wireless network. 802.11x has three parts:

There’s a lot of excitement nowadays about the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, in which employees use their own smartphones, tablets, or laptop computers to access the corporate network via wireless. But before you set up those wireless access points, there are a number of questions to consider.

Who’s allowed into the network?
The first step to managing BYOD is to decide who gets on your network. Do you have an open BYOD policy that lets any device connect to your network through wireless? Do you let anyone in, but make him or her register? Do you authenticate users via password? Do you allow only known devices onto the network? Do you support all devices and operating systems?

How much access are BYOD devices allowed?
Do you allow employees’ personal devices full network access or restrict them to Internet access only? If you allow full network access, is there a security policy in place to prevent company confidential information from being loaded into devices that may be lost or stolen?

How safe are BYOD devices and what are you going to do about them?
There’s more malware out there all the time, and it’s affecting more devices than ever. This is a problem not limited to laptop computers—the popular Android™ operating system for phones has a large amount of known malware. How will you screen connecting devices to make sure they have updated patches and don’t contain malware?